2 Winners, and 2 Approaches to Spreading the Word on Climate

The dual winners of the Nobel Peace Prize may be united in concern about global warming, but they differ starkly in style and, at times, in scientific substance.

One winner, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, speaks in the measured voice of peer-reviewed research and government negotiations. In four reports since 1990, the panel, led by Rajendra K. Pachauri, has always focused on the most noncontroversial findings. In 2001, it concluded, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

The other winner, former Vice President Al Gore, delivers brimstone-laden warnings of an unfolding “planetary emergency.” Mr. Gore has not shied from emphasizing the most emotionally potent though less certain consequences of warming like its link to hurricane intensity and rising sea levels.

Like many of the panel members interviewed, Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan and a lead author of some of the climate panel’s chapters in 2001 and this year, said he was thrilled that the prize elevated the issue. But Mr. Yohe said the focus on Mr. Gore as a personality and politician might distract from researchers’ strong consensus on the risks posed by unfettered emissions of heat-trapping gases. “If the spectacular nature of his presentations and the personalities involved become the story instead of the science,” Mr. Yohe said, “then it becomes counterproductive.”

He and other panel members were queasy about some of Mr. Gore’s points that exceeded the panel’s assessments. In “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary on Mr. Gore’s climate work, a fast-motion flood spills into ground zero, implying seas could rise many feet in the near term from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. In the panel’s latest study, losing the Greenland sheet was projected to take 1,000 years or more.

Some scientists, historians and policy experts said both messages, with all the imperfections attending each, seemed necessary to put attention on a looming planet-scale problem.

The Nobel “is honoring the science and the publicity, and they’re necessarily different,” said Spencer Weart, a science historian at the American Institute of Physics and the author of “The Discovery of Global Warming,” a book charting 100 years of climate research.

Dr. Weart added that both were essential because the science alone, laden with complexity and unavoidable uncertainty, would never jog average citizens or most elected officials.

“The I.P.C.C. was set up to be the lowest common denominator, to weed out anything anyone could disagree with,” he said. “It was deliberately created, largely under the influence of the Reagan administration, because governments didn’t want a bunch of self-appointed scientists from academies and so on out there.

“Even the Saudi government has to agree,” he said. “That means that when the I.P.C.C. says you’re in trouble, you’re really in trouble.”

If the profile of the issue had not been raised with “An Inconvenient Truth,” the panel’s reports this year would not have had nearly as much impact, experts said.

Among those crediting Mr. Gore for elevating the issue — if differing from him sharply on solutions — is former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich is a co-author of a new book, “A Contract With the Earth,” that accepts the notion that human-caused warming poses serious risks and urges the United States to, among other efforts, aggressively develop nonpolluting energy technologies.

“In a way, Vice President Gore, by raising the intensity of the issue, by talking about it, raised the challenge for those of us who think there’s an alternative to say, ‘O.K., right emotions, wrong answer,’” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview this week. “But then we have an obligation to provide an answer.”

He said he preferred incentives to step up energy research over Mr. Gore’s preference for mandatory national and global limits on gases.

An expert who was a panel author was more doubtful of the prize-worthy caliber of Mr. Gore and the panel’s work.

“The bottom line is that energy demand (and CO2 emissions) continue to rise,” John R. Christy, a climate expert at the University of Huntsville, Ala., wrote in an e-mail message.

Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton who has worked on the climate assessments, said the award correctly recognized the “long slog” to accepting that people are pushing on the planet’s thermostat.

“The award reminds us that expert advice can influence people and policy, that sometimes governments do listen to reason and that the idea that reason can guide human action is very much alive, if not yet fully realized,” Dr. Oppenheimer said.

It is time, he added, to break the deadlock over lowering emissions. “Public attention,” he said, “is now engaged at the highest level it will probably ever be.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Winners, and 2 Approaches to Spreading the Word on Climate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe